Tuesday, 7 December 2010

Explaining machine code.

The other night, whilst watching the second Ashes test whilst also trying to do some College work, one of my fellow students appeared on line with a desperate message which read that he didn't understand machine code and wanted an explanation. Diligently, I started to explain machine code, giving examples in Z80 and so on. Needless to say he was getting confused, and just before his brain exploded, it was getting late and time to call it a night (though I did watch a few more overs of the Cricket match as England were doing so well!)

The next day, I realised my mistake, or at least there was a problem in translation. What he meant to ask was about ASCII code *and not* machine code. So, all of my explanations were wasted when he could have simply looked up the ASCII table online in seconds. Well, a short and pointless story, but at least a younger generation now know the difference between machine code and ASCII code.